21 ms·

Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

313 points by tsujp 4y ago

pete_nic 4y ago
I signed up for a Codeblog! The Captcha making me pick photos of traffic lights and cross walks to verify my humanity feels like the antithesis of what this article and product is trying to do.
sailfast 4y ago
This is a submarine article at its finest. “Make the internet weird again with codeblog”
EddieDante 4y ago
This sales pitch doesn't impress me. The internet isn't fun or weird any longer because corporations have taken over, and most normies aren't going to bother to learn how to build and operate their own websites. Just like most normies aren't going to bother to become their own sysadmins so they can run GNU/Linux on their PCs. Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC with a comments section.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  QVC is almost quality content compared to parts of the web. Corporations do like it sanitized and fun is the lowest common denominator of content that is still able to hold your attention while reaching the largest audience as possible. But there is also truth that creativity of people gets stifled by locked down environments. In the past myspace blogs got a lot of mockery but I guess most people will miss it in contrast social media we have today. There is good stuff too and Tiktok is not the end of society, but the interesting stuff that can hold your attention beyond 10 minutes is rare. Perhaps it was never different and just seems this way because there is unlimited content.
- schroeding 4y ago
  But the internet was already taken over by corporations during the time this article reminisces about, wasn't it? MySpace was owned by a corporation, but allowed massive customization including custom CSS anyway. Youtube also allowed way more customization in the past (remember the old profile pages?), all those small local social networks that often allowed straight custom HTML died when Facebook expanded worldwide, they were mostly for-profit.
  - rnd0 4y ago
    Not exclusively taken over, no. It was more balanced between the corporate and the non-commercial.
- corford 4y ago
  >QVC with a comments section haha this is gold :)
Kaotique 4y ago
Fun and weird has moved into TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram with stickers, music, sounds and overlays. It allows millions of people to enjoy creating fun and weird things and not only the handful of people who want to mess around with html snippets. I miss it too, but we are the minority.
- tarkin2 4y ago
  I find TikTok and Instagram primarily about vanity, show-boating and moral crusades than creative expression. Of course, the internet of old had those negative elements in it, but now those seem to have become the bread and butter of such networks.
  - xnx 4y ago
    Dig deeper. TikTok is fantastically weird and niche. I've learned about so many things I'd never seen on the web or YouTube like small scale trains that people ride around in their back yard, throw gliders, and tether car racing.
tarkin2 4y ago
Because Google is the gatekeeper to what you see, and Google prioritises the boring and bland and CEO-friendly websites you see.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Well replace google with Facebook and Apple. Google just wants you to click adds.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    Advertisers are Google's real cu$tomer and they don't like to see their ads next to your experimental goatse art.
- Blikkentrekker 4y ago
  Correction: English-language Google is. — I find that very often the vaunted Anglo-Saxon moralism indeed only polices English content. I can find the most interesting and entertaining subjects searching in Japanese that do not show up when the same search is replicated in English, where it instead gives me something only barely related to my search that was simply popular enough. It's quite simple how Twitter is actually a bastion of free expression, so long it not be in English.
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Every culture has their norms, including Japan. Japan may have some areas they are more flexible with, but they have just as many, if not more that they rigid about too. People are different, trying to make them the same would be just as boring.
    - Blikkentrekker 4y ago
      Perhaps Japan does, but I'm simply saying that Anglo-Saxon moral overlords do no care about enforcing Japan's sense of moral offence, only their own, or even when written in Japanese. People have long noted that one can get away with writing many things that would have one banned or removed on Reddit or Twitter, so long as one not do it in English but in another language. The same thing applies to Youtube's anti-swearword system that really only demonitizes based on English swearwords, not in any other language.
passedandfuture 4y ago
Because you're using the wrong search engine. Try Mojeek for fresh results, and get involved with their community. I believe Mojeek will be a gamechanger.
- 6510 4y ago
  thanks, impressive results.
- blippage 4y ago
  I recently found www.gopher.com, which has a different feel to than Google or DuckDuckGo.
peterweyand0 4y ago
The link to codeblog.app doesn't work. Maybe hugged to death?
kossTKR 4y ago
I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever - it's all just streams of disconnected content free floating towards oblivion in a few days. This has made everything bite-sized and fragmented everyones attention as nothing is getting polished or curated to perfection. I miss people polishing stuff, then just letting it sit out there for people to enjoy. Today everything is hidden after a few days - so the rare gems disappear too while the algorithms and search engines favour the easily devourable in the first place. We need something like Stumbleupon back, does that exist? I wonder why it wasn't viable.
- joe__f 4y ago
  I liked Stumbleupon, I miss it too
- falcolas 4y ago
  > so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past their lifespan on the web. I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
amelius 4y ago
> Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? Etiquette. For example, humor is frowned upon on some forums (HN included).
- jansan 4y ago
  HN actually holds the current record for being the most humorless forum on the internet (sorry, can't seem to find link atm).
  - dgb23 4y ago
    There is a specific type of gem you find on HN sometimes: full-blown rants. I find them very entertaining and started to collect them recently.
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      Also, occasionally there are REALLY high quality, altough subtle, jokes in a comment that is still a part of a productive discussion. Humour for humours sake is definitely frowned upon though.
      - mellavora 4y ago
        such as the above post
        Akronymus 4y ago
        So subtle, it flew over my head and is still flying off into the sunset. I genuinly thought it was just someone enjoying collecting rants. (Which, some rants are quite enjoyable to read.)
        dgb23 4y ago
        When I realized I was making a joke it was already too late! In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
The internet is more fun and weird than it has ever been, but there's astronomically more boring unfun content getting in the way of finding fun stuff. Kind of the same story offline.
- prawn 4y ago
  I think this is probably correct. The fun stuff is still there, but the people trying to profit from their creations are more motivated to get it in front of you (SEO effort, etc).
- dylan604 4y ago
  Isn't this just art imitating life? In real life, the boring is every where. You have to find those niche stores/clubs/eateries/etc by putting forth effort vs just going to the same-ol-same-ol that advertises to get your attention.
simongray 4y ago
Native advertisement disguised as a blog post.
dschuetz 4y ago
Because of Big Tech. They buy everything up, make it go away, or monetize the shit out of it. Nothing weird or exciting survives.
- jtaft 4y ago
  https://zombo.com https://zombo.com
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    I love that after all these years, this still exists.
winternett 4y ago
I think it's a wide-scale effect of everyone scrambling in trying to make Internet money to fund themselves through our current tough and uncertain times but finding out that a lot of the Web 3.0 stuff and the Gig economy was undercover "scammy A.F.". Many people do not have savings now because of crypto, stock manipulation, and NFT schemes... There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right now, and many of the routes to money success are heavily overcomplicated and undesirable in execution. I have been keeping calm on my end through working on music and editing (often strange and comical) TikTok videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI), commenting on HN and Twitter, and through doing occasional stand up comedy open mic nights...
- vannevar 4y ago
  This is yet anther transformer-driven bot, right?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- adnmcq999 4y ago
  Lol
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
endisneigh 4y ago
"Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?" Turns post into an advertisement
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    Hello fellow furry pornmonger :) It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      It’s poison to mega corps because it doesn’t fit into contemporary “coolness”. Using furries decreases sales and that’s all they care about.
    - Cr4shMyCar 4y ago
      The fandom creates such an incredible environment for creators to thrive in. I went to a con near me and a walk through the dealer's den showed the vast variety of creators. Of course, there were artists with prints and merch, but there were also furry musicians with CDs of albums and DJ sets, a woodworker with carvings and laser-cut journals where the pages were magnetic inserts, someone selling fursuit parts like eyes and horns made out of resin, even a small handful of adult businesses (behind a curtain and with staff checking ages, of course). Music, games, books, especially art, it's all by furries, for furries, with the exception of a few mass-market friendly franchises that furries happen to love like Beastars or Zootopia.
greenbit 4y ago
"introducing codeblog" .. you might want to lead with that. You know, so people know what kind of thing they're clicking on
ren_engineer 4y ago
most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned out by the masses. The old school internet still exists to some degree but you are going to have to look harder to find where the weird people are at and most the people claiming they want the "weird" internet back would probably complain about those places same thing happens in any community/society as it ages and grows. People who create it are different from those who move in later once things are great
- deleted 4y ago
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- NoGravitas 4y ago
  > most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned out by the masses. That doesn't explain MySpace, though. Extremely mainstream/mass-oriented, but still fun and weird, while it lasted.
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    MySpace really wasn't that weird, they just had a bug that allowed people to express themselves with code and decided to leave it.
    - MaxfordAndSons 4y ago
      Exactly; it was novel not weird. And if it had prevailed over FB it would have adopted a slicker, uniform ui by default sooner or later (maybe let old heads keep seeing version 1 like Reddit does).
  - projektfu 4y ago
    Eventually it got to the point where comments on people's pages were making them unreadable or crashing the browser. That was too much customizability.
dalbasal 4y ago
I think these old "remember MySpace" ideas are off the mark. What actually happened was not minor changes in UX culture. The web became powerful, instead of a subculture over to the side. It became democratic and populist, with everyone participating rather than a self selected few. It became monopolized, regulated by Google/etc. and regulatable because giant companies are easier to regulate. The coming of copyright is underated as a factor in changing the web. Remember the spindletop days. Why is the oils industry no fun anymore?
vannevar 4y ago
There are lots of fun and weird things on the internet, but SEO prevents you from seeing most of them---you end up seeing only the parts that someone is motivated to pay to get you to look at. That's essentially Google's business model.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  I agree. Search having such a bias towards SEO as a measure of credibility has been incredibly damaging.
- lancesells 4y ago
  I'm always thinking of building an old-school directory of interesting sites on a limited number of topics. With the only automation being checking if the website is still up and either removing it or redirecting to an archive.
- vannevar 4y ago
  Another related problem is the pathological economy of kickbacks that has developed on the internet. Early on,it made some sense to offer a small finders fee for referring traffic that bought something---you were connecting someone with a service they needed but couldn't easily find online since the search engines were not very good. Now it would be trivially easy to find almost any online service if those services weren't deliberately obfuscated by a jungle of middlemen trying to be the one that snags the referral fee.
quaffapint 4y ago
It's been listed here before, but a fun ride that my son and I like to take in our Internet explorations... https://wilderness.land/ https://wilderness.land/
hardwaresofton 4y ago
Related: this guy built bun[0] (the new javascript runtime built with Zig and JavascriptCore) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993429
- asciiresort 4y ago
  How is this related?
bemmu 4y ago
VRChat may be the most fun and weird thing right now.
- krapp 4y ago
  It isn't hand-written, artisinally crafted HTML on a self-hosted server so obviously it's shit.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook. I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
- tjr225 4y ago
  Precisely. It isn't fun or weird because YOU aren't fun or weird. If you were fun or weird you'd already know where all the fun and weird stuff is.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Another aspect is that your view of the internet, which on its own is incomprehensibly large, is largely shaped by the tools you use to interact with it. It's difficult to become aware of just how much your choice of internet gateway will shape your view of what exists. If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects. If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar. If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam. If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes. and so on and so forth.
    - a1o 4y ago
      My navigator tends to remember the websites I view more, which are mostly communities, and I tend to click on the links it has when the browser opens. So I tend to use these communities as the internet gateway as you say - like hacker news! This concept of the internet gateway and the perceptual islands of ideas is really interesting, I think you should someday write about this.
AidenVennis 4y ago
First I thought the article (or maybe promotion) didn't gave an answer to the topic question, but it actually did; the need to sanitizing inputs destroyed what myspace enabled. The need for security is bigger than the need for customisation nowadays, you can't have a social network that has a big security flaw because users could edit the code on their pages. The product this article promotes isn't a solution, you still need developers to create the components users want, and users are not going to send requests to add something they think would be "fun" or "weird".
egypturnash 4y ago
I find it somewhat ironic that despite starting as a love letter to the colorful, fun things people did with MySpace, this post is still black text on a white background like the entire rest of the modern web (that’s not in dark mode). Pick some damn colors and make a statement, dude.
CamelCaseName 4y ago
Just look at one of the best platforms for "fun and weird" - YouTube. The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos. Every algorithm change directly impacts what creators, create, because no one wants to put in a whole lot of work for something to never be seen. If, for example, the ideal format for a joke or video is 3 minutes, that either gets disappeared from public view or becomes part of a longer video. The real answer, in my opinion, is that current recommendation engines prioritize profit rather than quality or innovation. Or perhaps their evaluation metrics are so bad that their goal is misunderstood. Or perhaps those who stand to profit have become too adept at gaming algorithms (or human psychology e.g. lewd thumbnails) that they degrade results. ...or perhaps we all suffer from nostalgia and forget how terrible the results were of yesteryear. Who knows, all I know is I feel disappointed in what the internet has become. Even this thread is really just an ad, hijacking our biases and climbing the HN ranks accordingly.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos. I mostly agree, but there are some counterexamples that provide very in depth, quality information and have gotten popular because of it. Off the top of my head, Ben Eater, Sebastian Lague, 3Blue1Brown, and Reducible. I think it's still very possible to get stuff that doesn't fit into the algorithm to take off if you make it interesting and high quality :)
- ayngg 4y ago
  The internet has changed from communities of interest to communities of people who commoditize social interaction within those interests. On the surface they seem fairly close to actual communities but they incentivize different things which changes how the community operates and personally I think they don't provide many of the healthy benefits of communities while cultivating some pretty unhealthy behavior loops.
  - standardly 4y ago
    You just described Reddit, right?
papito 4y ago
Because the barrier of entry is gone. Some level of difficulty of creating content weeded out the morons. It is now flooded with "content creators" of at best average intelligence. The early web was glorious. A bunch of weirdos and nerds with at least some technical skills created personal websites, mostly horrible-looking, and linked to each other. There were counters, guestbooks, moderated discussion boards... We were children discovering a new world, all over again. It was full of wonder and magic. Now - any idiot can whip out their phone and write anything they want, in a few seconds, and create "content". And THEN we all have to process that shit.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  While this rationale sounds true, but it doesn't actually align with my observations. Most of the web's noise content isn't low-effort comments, but low-effort commercial websites: Sometimes "tutorials" for extremely easy tasks padded with a bunch of superfluous instructions, sometimes freebooting other content, other times apparently AI-generated texts that seem legitimate at first glance but don't really make sense.
  - papito 4y ago
    Yes, absolutely, but it's in the same vein. In the past, to create content you had to go through some things. I still remember being on the phone with Network Solutions for an hour to activate my first domain. They asked for my password... Over the phone.... Now content creation is easy and, yes, automated.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Scraping blogs for content to steal and training language models to produce legit-seeming blog posts is hardly low-entry stuff, surely?
jdbernard 4y ago
This irks me: > We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Nope. People chose the simpler platforms and tools with lower barrier to entry (no need to code) and the strange, fun, weird things were choked out or relegated to the unseen corners of the Internet. For a brief period you had a lot of people learning to code at some level because it was the only way to engage with the Internet at all. It wasn't developers, designers, etc. that decided things should no longer have access to the tools, it was the consumer base at large who consistently chose the smoother, simpler, easier-to-use, less flexible, locked-down products. People still have access to the tools. The Internet has an extremely low barrier to entry. It is accessible in a way most serious technology isn't. My son has been publishing his own page, full of weird little games and odd styling choices, etc. since he was nine. Most people don't want products like MySpace. They voluntarily chose Facebook. I hope this company finds a successful niche. I'm glad for any tools that encourage people to invest in their own creativity. But I doubt they are going to achieve mainstream success. Hopefully I'm wrong.
Torwald 4y ago
Because "mobile first."
layer8 4y ago
This convinced me that the HN upvote button should throw confetti.
thibran 4y ago
> Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? Because everything is complicated now. To code your own website you have to learn hundreds of hours of web technologies. There is no clear way and a lot of old, now wrong, advice in old blog posts. This limits the creativity that can be expressed a lot and is probably the main reason why "everyone" is now using "platforms".
- kderbyma 4y ago
  I disagree. its no harder to program today than it was 15 years ago. in fact it is easier. its less meaningful....less satisfying....and has been eroded by copy-cats and everyone spinning up a product instead of a passion project.
- pixodaros 4y ago
  I created my static site with scripting, CSS, and HTML skills from the 1990s, an oughties Comp Sci degree, and w3cschools. HTML5 makes it scary easy to make a pretty site which works on a wide range of screens (no more full-width columns of black text on a white background!)
mattgreenrocks 4y ago
Don't sugar coat it. Call it what it really is: gentrification. 2000: creating content and fostering an online community in private was seen as super nerdy. 2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults fighting over Internet Points is "normal." And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-socialized people taking care to say the things they should say so the great Algorithm gives them more Internet Points. And those Internet Points warp the process of creation, especially when they're tied to money. Like the article said, it's all taken way too seriously, and there's no going back.
- alexalx666 4y ago
  What I did about it today is bookmarking some of the websites that were shared, I mean isnt it the same as in any century, now the difference is that you can have free access to good stuff
  - mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    Increasingly, I see the value in archiving long-form content I like, because link rot is so pervasive. Maybe time to start using pinboard again.
- magic_hamster 4y ago
  Is there no going back though? It doesn't take much to delete your social accounts and it seems like more and more people consider this. At some point you get tired of being a product. And when you create content, at some point you just want to do your thing instead of minmaxing the algorithm. We don't have to compromise for the huge social platforms or to make money for them.
s0teri0s 4y ago
The same reason television isn't more fun and weird.
javajosh 4y ago
God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you. The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire. The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options about where to hang their hat(s) and what they do there. Try convincing a Medium author that HTML is a good authoring tool. This article is the Internet version of "good old days" nostalgia, which is, ironically, retrograde and horrifying. One important exception: if the internet ever deprecates the tools needed to make another myspace (http 1.1, html, css, available ip addresses, ability to host a durable process) then you'd have my full-throated support. And of course you're allowed to like old things that failed because of market pressure. Just don't fool yourself that the world is worse because the thing you like fell out of fashion. As much as I hate to admit it, the world is better off without coin-op arcades.
- tb0ne 4y ago
  You make it seem like todays internet monopolies exist because of all the platform there are, they are the most well-designed ones, and they would simply be replaced if a better product came along. I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible. But it does not get replaced, because it is the established platform, and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction. So we are stuck with a horribly monopolized web, where the established websites can become very shitty, but you have to stay on them because everyone else is.
  - sumitviii 4y ago
    >and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction You can post on multiple platforms, you know. Content creators aren't stupid. They post on whichever platform is buzzing. It's their day job and the most popular ones know what they are doing than any of us.
  - javajosh 4y ago
kwatsonafter 4y ago
because either you get a groovy bathroom wall or you get a heavily moderated bathroom wall. You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things like, "Internets" work.
silent_cal 4y ago
The "old web" was quirky and cool, but it could also be extremely horrifying and disgusting. I miss some of it, but definitely not all of it.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  rotten.com, ratemypoo. Aaah, my wasted teenage years.
freilanzer 4y ago
Because it's corporate and serious business.
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
The availability of fun and weird has redefined both fun and weird. What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have been groundbreaking only a few years ago. Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird. A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them are absolutely spot-on genius. Fun, clever, and weird. Maybe accessibility contributes towards this desensitisation too? At any time that level of genius is at our fingertips. We're spoilt by the accessibility of the top 0.01% creative talents of humanity. Maybe we also actively avoid some of the fun and weird because we know we'll get caught in a productivity destroying rabbit hole of fun and weirdness?
- rambambram 4y ago
  Interesting take. I think it definitely plays a role.
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Odd. This is a promotional post and but because it has a fun headline no one seems to care.
masswerk 4y ago
Ok, I made something weird, recently: https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2022/philosophia-mechanica https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2022/philosophia-mechanica In case you asked, there's also an explanation for this. :-) (Notebook or desktop preferred, at least some mobile browsers seem to have issues with scaling SVG origins.)
low_common 4y ago
TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram have tons of cool content. This isn't 2005 anymore.
boringuser1 4y ago
rel2thr 4y ago
get on Urbit, it's early but it feels pretty weird You have to learn a new language to do anything, people are publishing weird sci-fi on it , there are raves and parties , it is self selecting a lot of weird people
RajT88 4y ago
My favorite bit of the old, weird internet was Portal Of Evil. Which took the "look at the weird stuff I found" aspect of stumbleupon, and used it as comedic fodder to poke fun at all the weird stuff.
kderbyma 4y ago
Individuals want customization, novelty and the ability to relate between one another and share and show off.....companies want ubiquity and uniformity amongst their user base......
darkmarmot 4y ago
Honestly, the internet has seemed somewhat barren to me since the death of Flash.
- moolcool 4y ago
  Technical purists disparage flash, all with valid reasons, but ignore all the respects in which it was extremely good. It allowed developers (young amateur/learning developers especially) to easily make extremely high quality games and animations, and publish them online in a format that was easy to access and run on very low-spec hardware. Nothing else I know of today comes close.
petesamrogers 4y ago
I created instant.gallery (no spam, no ads, no notifications) to be a fun and weird website - the problem is getting quality sites noticed without a huge ad spend. The big funnels (twitter, google and fb/ig) have taken over.
causi 4y ago
I enjoyed the internet more when I had fifty bookmarks instead of five.
reaperducer 4y ago
The answer is fear. The internet used to be full of fun, and whimsey, and people doing strange things, and being accepted for it. This applies to web sites, social media, and even discussion forms like HN. If you try to express humor on 90% of the internet today, you are attacked by anonymous mobs of people who get dopamine hits from being offended for other people who they have not met, and may not even exist. Case in point: In another thread, someone accidentally or through auto-correct used the word "silicone" instead of "silicon." A helpful HNer replied: You mean silicon. Silicone means something else. In the early days of the internet, someone could then have replied "What a boob!" and a certain percentage of the viewers would have gotten a slight giggle from it and moved on with their lives. Those who didn't find it humorous would also have moved on with their lives. But today, the self-righteous internet mobs would attack the person who wrote the boob comment, so people self-censor. Almost any time someone introduces any humor into HN, for example, someone points to imaginary "rules" and gets upset that if something isn't humorous to 100% of every single person on the planet, it shouldn't be uttered in public. Well, guess what — you're never going to get 100% of the people on the planet to agree about anything, so get over it.
BrainVirus 4y ago
The reason the web is not fun anymore is because it's now hypercentralized. Companies that effectively control the web found the formula that works for them. They want you to mindlessly consume streams of curated information. They want you to do that at maximum throughput. Most of your "interactions" with websites are fake and exist only to improve "engagement". If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer. Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that simple.
BrainVirus 4y ago
>Codeblog is powered by MDX, a new flavor of Markdown that supports JSX. With MDX, words look like words, and code looks like HTML. Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity. About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing. About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main ingredient being white-space: pre-line.) Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become published. Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world. The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.
- kurupt213 4y ago
  I think the point is to provide the entry level access for people who can’t do that yet
annoyingnoob 4y ago
https://www.cameronsworld.net https://www.cameronsworld.net
beardedman 4y ago
It was, but then went mainstream. And much like Metallica, the later stuff just isn't as good.
an9n 4y ago
I just don't want it to involve React
tylershuster 4y ago
https://tylershuster.github.io/an-ode-to-the-pomegranate/ https://tylershuster.github.io/an-ode-to-the-pomegranate/
- elias94 4y ago
  I got hypnotised
paulpauper 4y ago
The internet is dominated by winner-take-all markets. Niche sites generally don't stand a chance unless they get lucky.
mym1990 4y ago
In a nutshell, my internet routine has become: Check email > check ESPN > check HN > check WSJ. Every blog site I visit nowadays is literally full of ads, popups, etc...the content to ad ratio seems to be about 50/50, which is just bleh. I 100% think the internet still has lots of interesting things, but I think so much has moved to a centralized location nowadays, its a bit harder to find the unique parts of the web.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
(2019) Previous discussion from not really that long ago when this was first posted, probably alot of same sentiment as the question has been asked many times last few years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327
randommind 4y ago
btw it is worth mentioning for those interested that a German guy recently cloned the old myspace: https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/
remram 4y ago
I don't understand. Having those 3 quirky HTML tags is fine, but can users add other tags? How do they go about doing that? Can they enter the React definition of those tags somewhere on their site's configuration? Or in the page? Or install them from a marketplace, like the Sticker Packs of some apps? Right now this reads as "content platforms today don't let you enter code, so publish with us we don't allow code but we have confetti".
- aprinsen 4y ago
  I mean, if you can write arbitrary jsx and react, seems like you can define your own components?
jamal-kumar 4y ago
Wasn't the hugest reason that they stopped allowing people to write their own code in myspace and made it into something nobody uses anymore was because you could do code injection attacks on it? [1] I mean doesn't anyone else remember that kid who got convicted of a felony for getting everyone's myspace pages to say 'but most of all, samy is my hero'? [2] [1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06.html https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
aahortwwy2022 4y ago
When I was a teenager I came up with several technical and nontechnical websites, zines with programming and reverse engineering tutorials, interviews, and just plain fucking around. And everyone else around me was pretty much the same. There were multiple "scenes", we formed deep relations on IRC, even though almost none knew my real name or how I looked. I still meet some of those people online (few even in real life) more than 20 years later. Nowadays, I don't put anything too valuable on the web. Because why should I do anything for free, right? I don't live at the expense of my parents anymore, and society does not provide me with means to survive if I spend my time doing all that and "share". Now, since I'm unemployed and basically unemployable (no linkedin/facebook/whatever, disagree with gov policies re. covid and the society that accepts and promotes them hence don't get out much, won't consider working for unethical companies that track people for any purpose whatsoever (there are so many of those), introversion, etc.), I continue to do what I always did, write code, come up with theories that sometimes lead to personal projects, etc. But I definitely won't put these up on the web. Nowadays, I don't put anything too nonconforming on the web. There are still people doing stuff "for free". They get money from something or somewhere else. But nowadays it's mostly boring as shit. Why? Because nowadays people learn to abide by the dystopia's unwritten dicta: conform, obey, self-censor, follow, like, share. When you can no longer post anonymously, when everything you say is on a permanent record, when everything around you is moderated to Hell. When every movement is tracked, your best bet is to move along in the direction of the herd. If you don't, you will be disappeared from the relevant environment. Such a society can't be fun and weird; it actively discourages fun and weird.
- makz 4y ago
  So much this
xhrpost 4y ago
> The internet added<canvas />, but the internet stopped being one. Wow, well stated. I particularly miss just seeing more original content written by people's personal experiences. Now, it seems like any Google search results in bloat-ware sites with a ton of journalistic fluff around a few data points that came out on a news wire. I personally have some hope in the Gemini protocol returning some value to this space. It doesn't quite fit the "internet as a canvas" model, being text based with only links to images, but I think there is a lot of potential to bring more interesting content to the forefront again.
verifex 4y ago
I didn't see a conversation on this in the comments, maybe I missed it, but I think one of the reasons why you don't see as much creative control over web pages is spambots. Lots of things that I've put up on my own personal web page that let anyone add things to it also allowed spambots to invade. And since most software to repel spambots needs to be rather advanced to work effectively, you see instances where the user content part just keeps locked up until it's closed completely. This is a problem that big companies can solve, but it's much trickier for one guy with a web page to solve.
dhosek 4y ago
MySpace letting people put CSS and HTML into their pages was a huge security nightmare. My wife, before she left the company, led the security team and it was a constant battle to keep JS injection attacks off the site. I can only imagine how much worse it would be in 2022 vs 2008.
hansword 4y ago
I think this internet probably still exists, in a different form of course (15years later). I just think its discoverability has been swamped by the platforms overwhelming everything with low-effort-to-consume autoplay-until-I-fall-asleep content.
ya1sec 4y ago
I made an app called Moonjump as a tool to browse the fun/weird internet. It's a server that redirects you to a random page harvested from Are.na, Hacker News, Marginalia Search, Gossip Web, and other sources yet to be configured... I saw someoe mentioned Wiby - totally forgot to include that. Going to do it this weekend! My project aims spark curiosity and provide a portal to the vast collection of interesting material hidden by the commercial web. The source material is compiled with care by users of these aggregation platforms. Since this accumulation is performed by hand, pages are saved because they had an effect on the users who saved them. Hopefully you will find things that have an effect on you. Everything opens in a new tab, so you can easily close and jump again. I find that it's fun to map the jump function (https://moonjump.app/jump https://moonjump.app/jump) to a keyboard shortcut. Try it out: https://moonjump.app https://moonjump.app
rchaud 4y ago
Weirdness is a choice. Taking on an affectation of weirdness in order to sell products or advertising is quite obvious to the beholder, who ignores it, and not long after that, the Internet becomes a wasteland of e-commerce webshops and ad-ridden 'fun blogs'. There's also an enormous difference between personal 'weird' and corporate 'weird'. 'Personal weird' came from early-gen web designers who had to do everything on their own, including making GIFs with primitive '90s image editors. We have more advanced tools on our phones today, yet bloggers would sooner pick something off the shelf from GIPHY (a Facebook company), because it's easier. We don't even have weird homemade clipart anymore, we have soulless stock graphics from Canva. And a big Discord button where the webrings would be.
totemandtoken 4y ago
I was thinking about this earlier today. Several years ago I used to read Gwern's blog and I was thinking to myself how difficult it would be for someone to do anything remotely similar in today's environment. It's not just the superficial stuff the author of this article is mentioning - editing HTML and CSS and glitter. It's deeper than that. There's just not enough attention to go around. The economics are off and the incentives are misaligned. No one's going to read a hyper-neurotic blog post about a quantified self experiment anymore and that sort of content won't fare well on tik tok. And it's a shame.
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
It's still fun and weird, but it's in the dark corners of Twitter where you find these communities, Milady.
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
I think the Internet is fun and weird. I mean, you can find videos of people playing metal and reggae guitar riffs over crazy preachers speaking in tongues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTcs1nU5MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTcs1nU5MU
fleddr 4y ago
It's an awkward and elitist thing to say, but I believe it to be true: whatever is embraced by the masses, suffers in some ways. The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy, cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different. You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas. Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible. And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it middle of the road. Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem AI generated. I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now the thing is exploding and there's friction between the "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my words). As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet. Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  I might phrase it, "whatever is embraced by the masses becomes more appealing to the masses." Broadening in appeal is not necessarily worse, although it's surely worse from the perspective of the initial specialized interest group. Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else. The world is better off today with an Internet that billions find fun and useful, even if it's way less fun for us specifically.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Honestly, I think we have a discovery problem. There's plenty of room for both groups. In a way the internet is limitless. A lot of that weirdness still exists, it's just incredibly hard to find.
    - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
      That's a good point. I'd love to find a small chatroom full of a couple dozen strangers who share my interests, and many thousands of such chatrooms surely exist, but I'd never find one unless I had a friend point me to it.
cutler 4y ago
React.js and friends.
awsrocks 4y ago
MaxfordAndSons 4y ago
These periodic articles hand-wringing over the loss of old internet quirkiness are basically just re-posing a question isomorphic to "Why aren't people more fun and weird?" or "Why isn't society/culture/reality more fun and weird?", which are not actually interesting questions in my opinion. I mean, I get it, the internet used to be a different before it was the primary infrastructure for most human productivity, but is it not basically self-evident why things get less fun and weird when the user base goes from futurist nerds to everyone else?
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
As more people joined the internet, the content reverted to the mean of humanity. What surprised us is just how low down that mean is. Twitter : We hoped for listening in on The Algonquin Round Table we got listening to the last round at Al's bar. Facebook We hoped for pleasent updates from our friends lives, we got content moderators with PTSD Instagram: we hoped for pictures of our friends lives - we got told our friends aren't as good as other peoples friends.
asciiresort 4y ago
I’m surprised no one mentioned Neocities which is a spiritual revival of Geocities and the early 2000s web. The aesthetic is much more pronounced, possible too pronounced.
kurupt213 4y ago
So I hit the confetti button compulsively. I didn’t realize every page needs a confetti cannon until now.
Cr4shMyCar 4y ago
There's a new social media site called Cohost that actually allows stuff like this inside of posts. It lets people, say, recreate Blender's UI or make a Warioware microgame. It's a nice middle ground between the hellscape that is Twitter and the more self-contained DIY sites of Neocities (which is also cool, but never really stuck with me).
- infpeace 4y ago
  Could you share an invite code for Cohost, if you have one?
Terry_Roll 4y ago
I dont anyone can class this website as not fun and not weird! Seeing is believing! https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/
tkuraku 4y ago
My hope is that with ipv6 everyone will be default have a static IP address. That would make it much easier for people to play around with their own personal websites etc.
- grumbel 4y ago
  IPv6 addresses aren't going to be any more static than what we have now. And even if they were, the fundamental problem of self-hosting is reliability, not getting a static IP address (which you can work around with dynamic DNS services easily). But most people just don't want to play server admin 24/7 and having a site down for days just because you went on vacation just isn't a good way to a run a site. I think the only way to get back on track is if somebody comes up with a way to make publishing content on the net both trivial and robust. It needs to be a feature of your browser, not something you have to fiddle around with, with other tools. IPFS kind of promises that and at least in theory would be a great tool to rebuild the Web, but the performance is downright miserable right now and doesn't seem to be improving either. So maybe that's a dead end. Publishing aside, web browsers also need to get much better at discovering and keeping track of content. Bookmarks haven't improved in 30 years or even gotten worse, thus making it impossible to look for new content on small sites that don't update frequently. Having RSS support removed from all browsers was another big loss.
paulpauper 4y ago
All the fun and weird people either get: ignored, banned, de-platformed, censored , ridiculed, etc. So you end up with dozens of the same Vox and NYTs pieces about the same dozen subjects written in the same style, because those are the only things that survive the filter.
Konohamaru 4y ago
The answer to the title's question: "There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever." - George Orwell, 1984
lakomen 4y ago
Because Facebook and its uniformity bringing uniformity to the uninformed letting them stay uninformed. Also, bootstrap.

313 points by tsujp 4y ago

I signed up for a Codeblog! The Captcha making me pick photos of traffic lights and cross walks to verify my humanity feels like the antithesis of what this article and product is trying to do.

sailfast 4y ago

This is a submarine article at its finest. “Make the internet weird again with codeblog”

EddieDante 4y ago

This sales pitch doesn't impress me. The internet isn't fun or weird any longer because corporations have taken over, and most normies aren't going to bother to learn how to build and operate their own websites. Just like most normies aren't going to bother to become their own sysadmins so they can run GNU/Linux on their PCs. Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC with a comments section.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
QVC is almost quality content compared to parts of the web. Corporations do like it sanitized and fun is the lowest common denominator of content that is still able to hold your attention while reaching the largest audience as possible. But there is also truth that creativity of people gets stifled by locked down environments. In the past myspace blogs got a lot of mockery but I guess most people will miss it in contrast social media we have today. There is good stuff too and Tiktok is not the end of society, but the interesting stuff that can hold your attention beyond 10 minutes is rare. Perhaps it was never different and just seems this way because there is unlimited content.
schroeding 4y ago
But the internet was already taken over by corporations during the time this article reminisces about, wasn't it? MySpace was owned by a corporation, but allowed massive customization including custom CSS anyway. Youtube also allowed way more customization in the past (remember the old profile pages?), all those small local social networks that often allowed straight custom HTML died when Facebook expanded worldwide, they were mostly for-profit.
- rnd0 4y ago
  Not exclusively taken over, no. It was more balanced between the corporate and the non-commercial.
corford 4y ago
>QVC with a comments section haha this is gold :)

Kaotique 4y ago

Fun and weird has moved into TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram with stickers, music, sounds and overlays. It allows millions of people to enjoy creating fun and weird things and not only the handful of people who want to mess around with html snippets. I miss it too, but we are the minority.

tarkin2 4y ago
I find TikTok and Instagram primarily about vanity, show-boating and moral crusades than creative expression. Of course, the internet of old had those negative elements in it, but now those seem to have become the bread and butter of such networks.
- xnx 4y ago
  Dig deeper. TikTok is fantastically weird and niche. I've learned about so many things I'd never seen on the web or YouTube like small scale trains that people ride around in their back yard, throw gliders, and tether car racing.

tarkin2 4y ago

Because Google is the gatekeeper to what you see, and Google prioritises the boring and bland and CEO-friendly websites you see.

gonzo41 4y ago
Well replace google with Facebook and Apple. Google just wants you to click adds.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  Advertisers are Google's real cu$tomer and they don't like to see their ads next to your experimental goatse art.
Blikkentrekker 4y ago
Correction: English-language Google is. — I find that very often the vaunted Anglo-Saxon moralism indeed only polices English content. I can find the most interesting and entertaining subjects searching in Japanese that do not show up when the same search is replicated in English, where it instead gives me something only barely related to my search that was simply popular enough. It's quite simple how Twitter is actually a bastion of free expression, so long it not be in English.
- O__________O 4y ago
  Every culture has their norms, including Japan. Japan may have some areas they are more flexible with, but they have just as many, if not more that they rigid about too. People are different, trying to make them the same would be just as boring.
  - Blikkentrekker 4y ago
    Perhaps Japan does, but I'm simply saying that Anglo-Saxon moral overlords do no care about enforcing Japan's sense of moral offence, only their own, or even when written in Japanese. People have long noted that one can get away with writing many things that would have one banned or removed on Reddit or Twitter, so long as one not do it in English but in another language. The same thing applies to Youtube's anti-swearword system that really only demonitizes based on English swearwords, not in any other language.

passedandfuture 4y ago

Because you're using the wrong search engine. Try Mojeek for fresh results, and get involved with their community. I believe Mojeek will be a gamechanger.

6510 4y ago
thanks, impressive results.
blippage 4y ago
I recently found www.gopher.com, which has a different feel to than Google or DuckDuckGo.

peterweyand0 4y ago

The link to codeblog.app doesn't work. Maybe hugged to death?

kossTKR 4y ago

I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever - it's all just streams of disconnected content free floating towards oblivion in a few days. This has made everything bite-sized and fragmented everyones attention as nothing is getting polished or curated to perfection. I miss people polishing stuff, then just letting it sit out there for people to enjoy. Today everything is hidden after a few days - so the rare gems disappear too while the algorithms and search engines favour the easily devourable in the first place. We need something like Stumbleupon back, does that exist? I wonder why it wasn't viable.

joe__f 4y ago
I liked Stumbleupon, I miss it too
falcolas 4y ago
> so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past their lifespan on the web. I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.

amelius 4y ago

> Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? Etiquette. For example, humor is frowned upon on some forums (HN included).

jansan 4y ago
HN actually holds the current record for being the most humorless forum on the internet (sorry, can't seem to find link atm).
- dgb23 4y ago
  There is a specific type of gem you find on HN sometimes: full-blown rants. I find them very entertaining and started to collect them recently.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Also, occasionally there are REALLY high quality, altough subtle, jokes in a comment that is still a part of a productive discussion. Humour for humours sake is definitely frowned upon though.
    - mellavora 4y ago
      such as the above post
      - Akronymus 4y ago
        So subtle, it flew over my head and is still flying off into the sunset. I genuinly thought it was just someone enjoying collecting rants. (Which, some rants are quite enjoyable to read.)
        dgb23 4y ago
        When I realized I was making a joke it was already too late! In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

The internet is more fun and weird than it has ever been, but there's astronomically more boring unfun content getting in the way of finding fun stuff. Kind of the same story offline.

prawn 4y ago
I think this is probably correct. The fun stuff is still there, but the people trying to profit from their creations are more motivated to get it in front of you (SEO effort, etc).
dylan604 4y ago
Isn't this just art imitating life? In real life, the boring is every where. You have to find those niche stores/clubs/eateries/etc by putting forth effort vs just going to the same-ol-same-ol that advertises to get your attention.

simongray 4y ago

Native advertisement disguised as a blog post.

dschuetz 4y ago

Because of Big Tech. They buy everything up, make it go away, or monetize the shit out of it. Nothing weird or exciting survives.

jtaft 4y ago
https://zombo.com https://zombo.com
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  I love that after all these years, this still exists.

winternett 4y ago

I think it's a wide-scale effect of everyone scrambling in trying to make Internet money to fund themselves through our current tough and uncertain times but finding out that a lot of the Web 3.0 stuff and the Gig economy was undercover "scammy A.F.". Many people do not have savings now because of crypto, stock manipulation, and NFT schemes... There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right now, and many of the routes to money success are heavily overcomplicated and undesirable in execution. I have been keeping calm on my end through working on music and editing (often strange and comical) TikTok videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI), commenting on HN and Twitter, and through doing occasional stand up comedy open mic nights...

vannevar 4y ago
This is yet anther transformer-driven bot, right?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
adnmcq999 4y ago
Lol
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

endisneigh 4y ago

"Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?" Turns post into an advertisement

wnkrshm 4y ago
Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Hello fellow furry pornmonger :) It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    It’s poison to mega corps because it doesn’t fit into contemporary “coolness”. Using furries decreases sales and that’s all they care about.
  - Cr4shMyCar 4y ago
    The fandom creates such an incredible environment for creators to thrive in. I went to a con near me and a walk through the dealer's den showed the vast variety of creators. Of course, there were artists with prints and merch, but there were also furry musicians with CDs of albums and DJ sets, a woodworker with carvings and laser-cut journals where the pages were magnetic inserts, someone selling fursuit parts like eyes and horns made out of resin, even a small handful of adult businesses (behind a curtain and with staff checking ages, of course). Music, games, books, especially art, it's all by furries, for furries, with the exception of a few mass-market friendly franchises that furries happen to love like Beastars or Zootopia.

greenbit 4y ago

"introducing codeblog" .. you might want to lead with that. You know, so people know what kind of thing they're clicking on

ren_engineer 4y ago

most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned out by the masses. The old school internet still exists to some degree but you are going to have to look harder to find where the weird people are at and most the people claiming they want the "weird" internet back would probably complain about those places same thing happens in any community/society as it ages and grows. People who create it are different from those who move in later once things are great

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
NoGravitas 4y ago
> most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned out by the masses. That doesn't explain MySpace, though. Extremely mainstream/mass-oriented, but still fun and weird, while it lasted.
- joshmanders 4y ago
  MySpace really wasn't that weird, they just had a bug that allowed people to express themselves with code and decided to leave it.
  - MaxfordAndSons 4y ago
    Exactly; it was novel not weird. And if it had prevailed over FB it would have adopted a slicker, uniform ui by default sooner or later (maybe let old heads keep seeing version 1 like Reddit does).
- projektfu 4y ago
  Eventually it got to the point where comments on people's pages were making them unreadable or crashing the browser. That was too much customizability.

dalbasal 4y ago

I think these old "remember MySpace" ideas are off the mark. What actually happened was not minor changes in UX culture. The web became powerful, instead of a subculture over to the side. It became democratic and populist, with everyone participating rather than a self selected few. It became monopolized, regulated by Google/etc. and regulatable because giant companies are easier to regulate. The coming of copyright is underated as a factor in changing the web. Remember the spindletop days. Why is the oils industry no fun anymore?

vannevar 4y ago

There are lots of fun and weird things on the internet, but SEO prevents you from seeing most of them---you end up seeing only the parts that someone is motivated to pay to get you to look at. That's essentially Google's business model.

_ea1k 4y ago
I agree. Search having such a bias towards SEO as a measure of credibility has been incredibly damaging.
lancesells 4y ago
I'm always thinking of building an old-school directory of interesting sites on a limited number of topics. With the only automation being checking if the website is still up and either removing it or redirecting to an archive.
vannevar 4y ago
Another related problem is the pathological economy of kickbacks that has developed on the internet. Early on,it made some sense to offer a small finders fee for referring traffic that bought something---you were connecting someone with a service they needed but couldn't easily find online since the search engines were not very good. Now it would be trivially easy to find almost any online service if those services weren't deliberately obfuscated by a jungle of middlemen trying to be the one that snags the referral fee.

quaffapint 4y ago

It's been listed here before, but a fun ride that my son and I like to take in our Internet explorations... https://wilderness.land/ https://wilderness.land/

hardwaresofton 4y ago

Related: this guy built bun[0] (the new javascript runtime built with Zig and JavascriptCore) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993429

asciiresort 4y ago
How is this related?

bemmu 4y ago

VRChat may be the most fun and weird thing right now.

krapp 4y ago
It isn't hand-written, artisinally crafted HTML on a self-hosted server so obviously it's shit.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook. I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

tjr225 4y ago
Precisely. It isn't fun or weird because YOU aren't fun or weird. If you were fun or weird you'd already know where all the fun and weird stuff is.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Another aspect is that your view of the internet, which on its own is incomprehensibly large, is largely shaped by the tools you use to interact with it. It's difficult to become aware of just how much your choice of internet gateway will shape your view of what exists. If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects. If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar. If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam. If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes. and so on and so forth.
  - a1o 4y ago
    My navigator tends to remember the websites I view more, which are mostly communities, and I tend to click on the links it has when the browser opens. So I tend to use these communities as the internet gateway as you say - like hacker news! This concept of the internet gateway and the perceptual islands of ideas is really interesting, I think you should someday write about this.

AidenVennis 4y ago

First I thought the article (or maybe promotion) didn't gave an answer to the topic question, but it actually did; the need to sanitizing inputs destroyed what myspace enabled. The need for security is bigger than the need for customisation nowadays, you can't have a social network that has a big security flaw because users could edit the code on their pages. The product this article promotes isn't a solution, you still need developers to create the components users want, and users are not going to send requests to add something they think would be "fun" or "weird".

egypturnash 4y ago

I find it somewhat ironic that despite starting as a love letter to the colorful, fun things people did with MySpace, this post is still black text on a white background like the entire rest of the modern web (that’s not in dark mode). Pick some damn colors and make a statement, dude.

CamelCaseName 4y ago

Just look at one of the best platforms for "fun and weird" - YouTube. The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos. Every algorithm change directly impacts what creators, create, because no one wants to put in a whole lot of work for something to never be seen. If, for example, the ideal format for a joke or video is 3 minutes, that either gets disappeared from public view or becomes part of a longer video. The real answer, in my opinion, is that current recommendation engines prioritize profit rather than quality or innovation. Or perhaps their evaluation metrics are so bad that their goal is misunderstood. Or perhaps those who stand to profit have become too adept at gaming algorithms (or human psychology e.g. lewd thumbnails) that they degrade results. ...or perhaps we all suffer from nostalgia and forget how terrible the results were of yesteryear. Who knows, all I know is I feel disappointed in what the internet has become. Even this thread is really just an ad, hijacking our biases and climbing the HN ranks accordingly.

_gabe_ 4y ago
> The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long videos. I mostly agree, but there are some counterexamples that provide very in depth, quality information and have gotten popular because of it. Off the top of my head, Ben Eater, Sebastian Lague, 3Blue1Brown, and Reducible. I think it's still very possible to get stuff that doesn't fit into the algorithm to take off if you make it interesting and high quality :)
ayngg 4y ago
The internet has changed from communities of interest to communities of people who commoditize social interaction within those interests. On the surface they seem fairly close to actual communities but they incentivize different things which changes how the community operates and personally I think they don't provide many of the healthy benefits of communities while cultivating some pretty unhealthy behavior loops.
- standardly 4y ago
  You just described Reddit, right?

papito 4y ago

Because the barrier of entry is gone. Some level of difficulty of creating content weeded out the morons. It is now flooded with "content creators" of at best average intelligence. The early web was glorious. A bunch of weirdos and nerds with at least some technical skills created personal websites, mostly horrible-looking, and linked to each other. There were counters, guestbooks, moderated discussion boards... We were children discovering a new world, all over again. It was full of wonder and magic. Now - any idiot can whip out their phone and write anything they want, in a few seconds, and create "content". And THEN we all have to process that shit.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
While this rationale sounds true, but it doesn't actually align with my observations. Most of the web's noise content isn't low-effort comments, but low-effort commercial websites: Sometimes "tutorials" for extremely easy tasks padded with a bunch of superfluous instructions, sometimes freebooting other content, other times apparently AI-generated texts that seem legitimate at first glance but don't really make sense.
- papito 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely, but it's in the same vein. In the past, to create content you had to go through some things. I still remember being on the phone with Network Solutions for an hour to activate my first domain. They asked for my password... Over the phone.... Now content creation is easy and, yes, automated.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Scraping blogs for content to steal and training language models to produce legit-seeming blog posts is hardly low-entry stuff, surely?

jdbernard 4y ago

This irks me: > We — the programmers, designers, product people — collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code in everyday products. Nope. People chose the simpler platforms and tools with lower barrier to entry (no need to code) and the strange, fun, weird things were choked out or relegated to the unseen corners of the Internet. For a brief period you had a lot of people learning to code at some level because it was the only way to engage with the Internet at all. It wasn't developers, designers, etc. that decided things should no longer have access to the tools, it was the consumer base at large who consistently chose the smoother, simpler, easier-to-use, less flexible, locked-down products. People still have access to the tools. The Internet has an extremely low barrier to entry. It is accessible in a way most serious technology isn't. My son has been publishing his own page, full of weird little games and odd styling choices, etc. since he was nine. Most people don't want products like MySpace. They voluntarily chose Facebook. I hope this company finds a successful niche. I'm glad for any tools that encourage people to invest in their own creativity. But I doubt they are going to achieve mainstream success. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Torwald 4y ago

Because "mobile first."

layer8 4y ago

This convinced me that the HN upvote button should throw confetti.

thibran 4y ago

> Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? Because everything is complicated now. To code your own website you have to learn hundreds of hours of web technologies. There is no clear way and a lot of old, now wrong, advice in old blog posts. This limits the creativity that can be expressed a lot and is probably the main reason why "everyone" is now using "platforms".

kderbyma 4y ago
I disagree. its no harder to program today than it was 15 years ago. in fact it is easier. its less meaningful....less satisfying....and has been eroded by copy-cats and everyone spinning up a product instead of a passion project.
pixodaros 4y ago
I created my static site with scripting, CSS, and HTML skills from the 1990s, an oughties Comp Sci degree, and w3cschools. HTML5 makes it scary easy to make a pretty site which works on a wide range of screens (no more full-width columns of black text on a white background!)

mattgreenrocks 4y ago

Don't sugar coat it. Call it what it really is: gentrification. 2000: creating content and fostering an online community in private was seen as super nerdy. 2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults fighting over Internet Points is "normal." And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-socialized people taking care to say the things they should say so the great Algorithm gives them more Internet Points. And those Internet Points warp the process of creation, especially when they're tied to money. Like the article said, it's all taken way too seriously, and there's no going back.

alexalx666 4y ago
What I did about it today is bookmarking some of the websites that were shared, I mean isnt it the same as in any century, now the difference is that you can have free access to good stuff
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Increasingly, I see the value in archiving long-form content I like, because link rot is so pervasive. Maybe time to start using pinboard again.
magic_hamster 4y ago
Is there no going back though? It doesn't take much to delete your social accounts and it seems like more and more people consider this. At some point you get tired of being a product. And when you create content, at some point you just want to do your thing instead of minmaxing the algorithm. We don't have to compromise for the huge social platforms or to make money for them.

s0teri0s 4y ago

The same reason television isn't more fun and weird.

javajosh 4y ago

God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you. The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire. The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options about where to hang their hat(s) and what they do there. Try convincing a Medium author that HTML is a good authoring tool. This article is the Internet version of "good old days" nostalgia, which is, ironically, retrograde and horrifying. One important exception: if the internet ever deprecates the tools needed to make another myspace (http 1.1, html, css, available ip addresses, ability to host a durable process) then you'd have my full-throated support. And of course you're allowed to like old things that failed because of market pressure. Just don't fool yourself that the world is worse because the thing you like fell out of fashion. As much as I hate to admit it, the world is better off without coin-op arcades.

tb0ne 4y ago
You make it seem like todays internet monopolies exist because of all the platform there are, they are the most well-designed ones, and they would simply be replaced if a better product came along. I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible. But it does not get replaced, because it is the established platform, and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction. So we are stuck with a horribly monopolized web, where the established websites can become very shitty, but you have to stay on them because everyone else is.
- sumitviii 4y ago
  >and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction You can post on multiple platforms, you know. Content creators aren't stupid. They post on whichever platform is buzzing. It's their day job and the most popular ones know what they are doing than any of us.
- javajosh 4y ago

kwatsonafter 4y ago

because either you get a groovy bathroom wall or you get a heavily moderated bathroom wall. You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things like, "Internets" work.

silent_cal 4y ago

The "old web" was quirky and cool, but it could also be extremely horrifying and disgusting. I miss some of it, but definitely not all of it.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago
rotten.com, ratemypoo. Aaah, my wasted teenage years.

freilanzer 4y ago

Because it's corporate and serious business.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago

The availability of fun and weird has redefined both fun and weird. What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have been groundbreaking only a few years ago. Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird. A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them are absolutely spot-on genius. Fun, clever, and weird. Maybe accessibility contributes towards this desensitisation too? At any time that level of genius is at our fingertips. We're spoilt by the accessibility of the top 0.01% creative talents of humanity. Maybe we also actively avoid some of the fun and weird because we know we'll get caught in a productivity destroying rabbit hole of fun and weirdness?

rambambram 4y ago
Interesting take. I think it definitely plays a role.

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Odd. This is a promotional post and but because it has a fun headline no one seems to care.

masswerk 4y ago

Ok, I made something weird, recently: https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2022/philosophia-mechanica https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2022/philosophia-mechanica In case you asked, there's also an explanation for this. :-) (Notebook or desktop preferred, at least some mobile browsers seem to have issues with scaling SVG origins.)

low_common 4y ago

TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram have tons of cool content. This isn't 2005 anymore.

boringuser1 4y ago

rel2thr 4y ago

get on Urbit, it's early but it feels pretty weird You have to learn a new language to do anything, people are publishing weird sci-fi on it , there are raves and parties , it is self selecting a lot of weird people

RajT88 4y ago

My favorite bit of the old, weird internet was Portal Of Evil. Which took the "look at the weird stuff I found" aspect of stumbleupon, and used it as comedic fodder to poke fun at all the weird stuff.

kderbyma 4y ago

Individuals want customization, novelty and the ability to relate between one another and share and show off.....companies want ubiquity and uniformity amongst their user base......

darkmarmot 4y ago

Honestly, the internet has seemed somewhat barren to me since the death of Flash.

moolcool 4y ago
Technical purists disparage flash, all with valid reasons, but ignore all the respects in which it was extremely good. It allowed developers (young amateur/learning developers especially) to easily make extremely high quality games and animations, and publish them online in a format that was easy to access and run on very low-spec hardware. Nothing else I know of today comes close.

petesamrogers 4y ago

I created instant.gallery (no spam, no ads, no notifications) to be a fun and weird website - the problem is getting quality sites noticed without a huge ad spend. The big funnels (twitter, google and fb/ig) have taken over.

causi 4y ago

I enjoyed the internet more when I had fifty bookmarks instead of five.

reaperducer 4y ago

The answer is fear. The internet used to be full of fun, and whimsey, and people doing strange things, and being accepted for it. This applies to web sites, social media, and even discussion forms like HN. If you try to express humor on 90% of the internet today, you are attacked by anonymous mobs of people who get dopamine hits from being offended for other people who they have not met, and may not even exist. Case in point: In another thread, someone accidentally or through auto-correct used the word "silicone" instead of "silicon." A helpful HNer replied: You mean silicon. Silicone means something else. In the early days of the internet, someone could then have replied "What a boob!" and a certain percentage of the viewers would have gotten a slight giggle from it and moved on with their lives. Those who didn't find it humorous would also have moved on with their lives. But today, the self-righteous internet mobs would attack the person who wrote the boob comment, so people self-censor. Almost any time someone introduces any humor into HN, for example, someone points to imaginary "rules" and gets upset that if something isn't humorous to 100% of every single person on the planet, it shouldn't be uttered in public. Well, guess what — you're never going to get 100% of the people on the planet to agree about anything, so get over it.

BrainVirus 4y ago

The reason the web is not fun anymore is because it's now hypercentralized. Companies that effectively control the web found the formula that works for them. They want you to mindlessly consume streams of curated information. They want you to do that at maximum throughput. Most of your "interactions" with websites are fake and exist only to improve "engagement". If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer. Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that simple.

BrainVirus 4y ago

>Codeblog is powered by MDX, a new flavor of Markdown that supports JSX. With MDX, words look like words, and code looks like HTML. Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity. About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing. About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main ingredient being white-space: pre-line.) Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become published. Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world. The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.

kurupt213 4y ago
I think the point is to provide the entry level access for people who can’t do that yet

annoyingnoob 4y ago

https://www.cameronsworld.net https://www.cameronsworld.net

beardedman 4y ago

It was, but then went mainstream. And much like Metallica, the later stuff just isn't as good.

an9n 4y ago

I just don't want it to involve React

tylershuster 4y ago

https://tylershuster.github.io/an-ode-to-the-pomegranate/ https://tylershuster.github.io/an-ode-to-the-pomegranate/

elias94 4y ago
I got hypnotised

paulpauper 4y ago

The internet is dominated by winner-take-all markets. Niche sites generally don't stand a chance unless they get lucky.

mym1990 4y ago

In a nutshell, my internet routine has become: Check email > check ESPN > check HN > check WSJ. Every blog site I visit nowadays is literally full of ads, popups, etc...the content to ad ratio seems to be about 50/50, which is just bleh. I 100% think the internet still has lots of interesting things, but I think so much has moved to a centralized location nowadays, its a bit harder to find the unique parts of the web.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

(2019) Previous discussion from not really that long ago when this was first posted, probably alot of same sentiment as the question has been asked many times last few years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327

randommind 4y ago

btw it is worth mentioning for those interested that a German guy recently cloned the old myspace: https://spacehey.com/ https://spacehey.com/

remram 4y ago

I don't understand. Having those 3 quirky HTML tags is fine, but can users add other tags? How do they go about doing that? Can they enter the React definition of those tags somewhere on their site's configuration? Or in the page? Or install them from a marketplace, like the Sticker Packs of some apps? Right now this reads as "content platforms today don't let you enter code, so publish with us we don't allow code but we have confetti".

aprinsen 4y ago
I mean, if you can write arbitrary jsx and react, seems like you can define your own components?

jamal-kumar 4y ago

Wasn't the hugest reason that they stopped allowing people to write their own code in myspace and made it into something nobody uses anymore was because you could do code injection attacks on it? [1] I mean doesn't anyone else remember that kid who got convicted of a felony for getting everyone's myspace pages to say 'but most of all, samy is my hero'? [2] [1] https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06.html https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

aahortwwy2022 4y ago

When I was a teenager I came up with several technical and nontechnical websites, zines with programming and reverse engineering tutorials, interviews, and just plain fucking around. And everyone else around me was pretty much the same. There were multiple "scenes", we formed deep relations on IRC, even though almost none knew my real name or how I looked. I still meet some of those people online (few even in real life) more than 20 years later. Nowadays, I don't put anything too valuable on the web. Because why should I do anything for free, right? I don't live at the expense of my parents anymore, and society does not provide me with means to survive if I spend my time doing all that and "share". Now, since I'm unemployed and basically unemployable (no linkedin/facebook/whatever, disagree with gov policies re. covid and the society that accepts and promotes them hence don't get out much, won't consider working for unethical companies that track people for any purpose whatsoever (there are so many of those), introversion, etc.), I continue to do what I always did, write code, come up with theories that sometimes lead to personal projects, etc. But I definitely won't put these up on the web. Nowadays, I don't put anything too nonconforming on the web. There are still people doing stuff "for free". They get money from something or somewhere else. But nowadays it's mostly boring as shit. Why? Because nowadays people learn to abide by the dystopia's unwritten dicta: conform, obey, self-censor, follow, like, share. When you can no longer post anonymously, when everything you say is on a permanent record, when everything around you is moderated to Hell. When every movement is tracked, your best bet is to move along in the direction of the herd. If you don't, you will be disappeared from the relevant environment. Such a society can't be fun and weird; it actively discourages fun and weird.

makz 4y ago
So much this

xhrpost 4y ago

> The internet added<canvas />, but the internet stopped being one. Wow, well stated. I particularly miss just seeing more original content written by people's personal experiences. Now, it seems like any Google search results in bloat-ware sites with a ton of journalistic fluff around a few data points that came out on a news wire. I personally have some hope in the Gemini protocol returning some value to this space. It doesn't quite fit the "internet as a canvas" model, being text based with only links to images, but I think there is a lot of potential to bring more interesting content to the forefront again.

verifex 4y ago

I didn't see a conversation on this in the comments, maybe I missed it, but I think one of the reasons why you don't see as much creative control over web pages is spambots. Lots of things that I've put up on my own personal web page that let anyone add things to it also allowed spambots to invade. And since most software to repel spambots needs to be rather advanced to work effectively, you see instances where the user content part just keeps locked up until it's closed completely. This is a problem that big companies can solve, but it's much trickier for one guy with a web page to solve.

dhosek 4y ago

MySpace letting people put CSS and HTML into their pages was a huge security nightmare. My wife, before she left the company, led the security team and it was a constant battle to keep JS injection attacks off the site. I can only imagine how much worse it would be in 2022 vs 2008.

hansword 4y ago

I think this internet probably still exists, in a different form of course (15years later). I just think its discoverability has been swamped by the platforms overwhelming everything with low-effort-to-consume autoplay-until-I-fall-asleep content.

ya1sec 4y ago

I made an app called Moonjump as a tool to browse the fun/weird internet. It's a server that redirects you to a random page harvested from Are.na, Hacker News, Marginalia Search, Gossip Web, and other sources yet to be configured... I saw someoe mentioned Wiby - totally forgot to include that. Going to do it this weekend! My project aims spark curiosity and provide a portal to the vast collection of interesting material hidden by the commercial web. The source material is compiled with care by users of these aggregation platforms. Since this accumulation is performed by hand, pages are saved because they had an effect on the users who saved them. Hopefully you will find things that have an effect on you. Everything opens in a new tab, so you can easily close and jump again. I find that it's fun to map the jump function (https://moonjump.app/jump https://moonjump.app/jump) to a keyboard shortcut. Try it out: https://moonjump.app https://moonjump.app

rchaud 4y ago

Weirdness is a choice. Taking on an affectation of weirdness in order to sell products or advertising is quite obvious to the beholder, who ignores it, and not long after that, the Internet becomes a wasteland of e-commerce webshops and ad-ridden 'fun blogs'. There's also an enormous difference between personal 'weird' and corporate 'weird'. 'Personal weird' came from early-gen web designers who had to do everything on their own, including making GIFs with primitive '90s image editors. We have more advanced tools on our phones today, yet bloggers would sooner pick something off the shelf from GIPHY (a Facebook company), because it's easier. We don't even have weird homemade clipart anymore, we have soulless stock graphics from Canva. And a big Discord button where the webrings would be.

totemandtoken 4y ago

I was thinking about this earlier today. Several years ago I used to read Gwern's blog and I was thinking to myself how difficult it would be for someone to do anything remotely similar in today's environment. It's not just the superficial stuff the author of this article is mentioning - editing HTML and CSS and glitter. It's deeper than that. There's just not enough attention to go around. The economics are off and the incentives are misaligned. No one's going to read a hyper-neurotic blog post about a quantified self experiment anymore and that sort of content won't fare well on tik tok. And it's a shame.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

It's still fun and weird, but it's in the dark corners of Twitter where you find these communities, Milady.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

I think the Internet is fun and weird. I mean, you can find videos of people playing metal and reggae guitar riffs over crazy preachers speaking in tongues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTcs1nU5MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTcs1nU5MU

fleddr 4y ago

It's an awkward and elitist thing to say, but I believe it to be true: whatever is embraced by the masses, suffers in some ways. The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy, cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different. You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas. Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible. And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it middle of the road. Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem AI generated. I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now the thing is exploding and there's friction between the "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my words). As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet. Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago
I might phrase it, "whatever is embraced by the masses becomes more appealing to the masses." Broadening in appeal is not necessarily worse, although it's surely worse from the perspective of the initial specialized interest group. Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else. The world is better off today with an Internet that billions find fun and useful, even if it's way less fun for us specifically.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Honestly, I think we have a discovery problem. There's plenty of room for both groups. In a way the internet is limitless. A lot of that weirdness still exists, it's just incredibly hard to find.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    That's a good point. I'd love to find a small chatroom full of a couple dozen strangers who share my interests, and many thousands of such chatrooms surely exist, but I'd never find one unless I had a friend point me to it.

cutler 4y ago

React.js and friends.

awsrocks 4y ago

MaxfordAndSons 4y ago

These periodic articles hand-wringing over the loss of old internet quirkiness are basically just re-posing a question isomorphic to "Why aren't people more fun and weird?" or "Why isn't society/culture/reality more fun and weird?", which are not actually interesting questions in my opinion. I mean, I get it, the internet used to be a different before it was the primary infrastructure for most human productivity, but is it not basically self-evident why things get less fun and weird when the user base goes from futurist nerds to everyone else?

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

As more people joined the internet, the content reverted to the mean of humanity. What surprised us is just how low down that mean is. Twitter : We hoped for listening in on The Algonquin Round Table we got listening to the last round at Al's bar. Facebook We hoped for pleasent updates from our friends lives, we got content moderators with PTSD Instagram: we hoped for pictures of our friends lives - we got told our friends aren't as good as other peoples friends.

asciiresort 4y ago

I’m surprised no one mentioned Neocities which is a spiritual revival of Geocities and the early 2000s web. The aesthetic is much more pronounced, possible too pronounced.

kurupt213 4y ago

So I hit the confetti button compulsively. I didn’t realize every page needs a confetti cannon until now.

Cr4shMyCar 4y ago

There's a new social media site called Cohost that actually allows stuff like this inside of posts. It lets people, say, recreate Blender's UI or make a Warioware microgame. It's a nice middle ground between the hellscape that is Twitter and the more self-contained DIY sites of Neocities (which is also cool, but never really stuck with me).

infpeace 4y ago
Could you share an invite code for Cohost, if you have one?

Terry_Roll 4y ago

I dont anyone can class this website as not fun and not weird! Seeing is believing! https://www.lingscars.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/

tkuraku 4y ago

My hope is that with ipv6 everyone will be default have a static IP address. That would make it much easier for people to play around with their own personal websites etc.

grumbel 4y ago
IPv6 addresses aren't going to be any more static than what we have now. And even if they were, the fundamental problem of self-hosting is reliability, not getting a static IP address (which you can work around with dynamic DNS services easily). But most people just don't want to play server admin 24/7 and having a site down for days just because you went on vacation just isn't a good way to a run a site. I think the only way to get back on track is if somebody comes up with a way to make publishing content on the net both trivial and robust. It needs to be a feature of your browser, not something you have to fiddle around with, with other tools. IPFS kind of promises that and at least in theory would be a great tool to rebuild the Web, but the performance is downright miserable right now and doesn't seem to be improving either. So maybe that's a dead end. Publishing aside, web browsers also need to get much better at discovering and keeping track of content. Bookmarks haven't improved in 30 years or even gotten worse, thus making it impossible to look for new content on small sites that don't update frequently. Having RSS support removed from all browsers was another big loss.

paulpauper 4y ago

All the fun and weird people either get: ignored, banned, de-platformed, censored , ridiculed, etc. So you end up with dozens of the same Vox and NYTs pieces about the same dozen subjects written in the same style, because those are the only things that survive the filter.

Konohamaru 4y ago

The answer to the title's question: "There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever." - George Orwell, 1984

lakomen 4y ago

Because Facebook and its uniformity bringing uniformity to the uninformed letting them stay uninformed. Also, bootstrap.